Promise Keepers — George Verwer

Promise Keepers and the Call to Global Mission

It's a privilege to be here in this place. We thank you for this tremendous place, the great provision it has been for the work, which over the years has enabled us to channel even more finance out to the front lines and into people and into projects across the globe.

Lord, I just know with all my heart you want to speak to us tonight. You already have spoken. I thank you for these reports and challenges in the time of worship. And Lord, help each one of us to receive what you want to give us, that we may be more mature, that we may be more like you, O Christ.

This is our longing. We know this has to be simultaneous with our passion to reach the lost. And only you can keep it in balance and in focus. So we ask for your help. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. It's a privilege to be able to share with you.

I really believe that little mini-conferences like this are so strategic. It's a privilege to be able to share. My heart is very, very full. Can you imagine, I've just come from a gathering of almost one million men.

I've come directly from Washington, arrived this morning. And I could spend my whole session just talking about promise keepers. I was discouraged to see a very negative article in British press against promise keepers from before the rally.

And then somebody handed me this amazing positive article from the Daily Telegraph after the rally that they say has really silenced many of the critics. As I watched Coach Bill McCartney on television, Maine, primetime evening interview program, the night before the big Saturday event, the heavy questions that came on him, God just gave him tremendous grace to answer those questions in a powerful way.

As I was walking toward the area where the solemn assembly was being held, I heard a lot of women screaming. And I knew that one of the extreme feminist organizations was running a simultaneous protest.

I never did meet them, though I looked for them on the Capitol steps where they were supposed to be. But as I heard this group of women shouting, I thought that must be this group attacking the promise keepers.

But in fact, it was another women's group affirming these men. And I walked over real close to see if I could pick up some of that affirmation. We certainly live in amazing days, so much evil, so many terrible things, so much crime, over one million people in the United States in prison.

I talked to a former OEMer who's a member of the Board of Trustees in a Wisconsin Christian school. A young couple, their romance just broke, the young boy couldn't handle it, and he murdered his own girlfriend.

He's now in prison long term. I talked to another famous outstanding Christian leader in Atlanta whose son at 24 years of age, also out of control, murdered a young woman that has 50 years sentence in the Florida prison.

My heart breaks for the prisons. During my time in the States, Jack Bennett was sentenced, the founder, leader of the new era. Found guilty, sentenced for 12 years with no negotiation, though they are appealing that.

I talked to his wife, I guess it was yesterday morning. Couldn't, didn't even know where her husband was as he was just shifted quickly to another prison. I'd actually wanted to visit him, but they were not giving out permits beyond family.

Spent the whole night in British Airways Jet, one of my favorite airlines. And saw a documentary on one of my favorite people in the world, Mr. Bean. Absolutely an amazing story of this man. As probably you know now, there's Mr. Bean, the movie which has been pretty, quite attacked here in England by some, but in fact has not yet been released in the United States.

And the movie was more created for the United States market. But it is amazing, isn't the place of humor. Somebody wrote me a critical letter about global action in Hyderabad. There is too much humor.

At least they can't blame it on me, I wasn't there. But you get a lot of humor through the internet. And I thought at this stage of these reports, it would be good to have just a little humor from the internet.

Some of you probably see some of this stuff, it is terrible. Some of it, some of it is quite, quite good. And I thought I'd just read a few that came in. Just recently I spent most of the night reading my post.

This comes from, people just usually pass these things on. These are questions that we need to deal with. Instead of talking to your plants if you yell at them, would they still grow? Only to be troubled and insecure.

Two, isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do a practice? What should you do when you see an endangered animal that is eating an endangered plant? Here's one probably for the next general counsel.

Is it possible to be totally partial? Why do they lock petrol station bathrooms? Are they afraid someone will clean them? This one I heard when I was in New Jersey. It's a little bit chauvinistic, but since I've come from a men's meeting, you can handle it.

If a man speaks in the forest and there's no woman to hear him, is he still wrong? Why do sheep, this is very relevant here at the Quinta. Why do sheep, why don't sheep shrink when it rains? I think that's enough.

Well, I'm glad you all know how to laugh. Because you might be a little uncomfortable by the end of this little series of exhortations. There are many things on my heart, and I know that must be a cliché.

It was great at our prayer meeting a few weeks ago to have Martin Bateman do a takeoff on George Burwer. I requested it personally as the meeting was getting a little dull. But I would like to just say a further word about Promise Keepers.

Promise Keepers as a Global Men's Movement

Some of you don't know about this movement. But David Tarabury, after being the chief financial officer with OM, went with Promise Keepers. Promise Keepers is only about eight years old. Another brother out of Atlanta, Hector, went with them.

So many of us have prayed for Promise Keepers from the beginning. It's a men's movement with seven major promises that are well worth studying. Most of them we had in our own fellowship in the early days and still do.

The seventh major promise is the Great Commission, which I call the Neglected Promise. When people heard I was going to Promise Keepers, and this was just added last minute to my visit to the States, where I went mainly to speak to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and a few other things, I stayed on because of an invitation to be part of the international conference of the global Promise Keepers movement, which is just being born in the last couple of years.

So they are now going global. Britain was just accepted at their meeting recently of their board. There's only about seven other countries that are accepted into the fellowship or association. They all realize they have to do it differently in their own country.

There's not the plan that you're going to try to copy what's happened in the States. I think they're even more than aware of the problems and the complications of launching a men's movement. I was talking to someone from Sweden about how to try to launch something like this in Sweden.

Needless to say, the Holy Spirit has been working through this movement. Last year alone they had over one million people, or the year before, 1996, over one million, way beyond that, in stadiums, all men.

This year the stadium attendance dropped. You have to pay quite a good amount of money to go to those meetings. Stadium attendance dropped, their finance dropped, and they went through a major upheaval.

I met a number of the people who have been through that upheaval. In fact, David Terribory is no longer with them, and 200 other people were laid off. Their staff had to grow so quickly to cope with just phenomenal growth.

When the money didn't come in, they had no other way until the last few months when they changed their financial policy. No other way to get the money except by the fees for going to the stadium for these great events.

With a very wide inter-dominational, inter-racial group of ministers. One of the things that we've noticed as we've followed this is the outstanding men they do get at these great stadium events. Some people believe that it fell a little short this year because so many people around the nation were focusing on this Washington event, October 4th.

Praying for between 500 ,000 and 1 ,000 ,000 men. Believe me, that is a lot of people. That is a lot of people. I have never seen so many people in one place in my life except maybe on television. I've been in stadium meetings, and I can even think of great melas in India where I've been certainly surrounded by a few hundred thousand.

They must have had close to a million. Some would say more, some would say less. The Park Commission did not want to get involved in counting because on the Farrakhan Million March of the Muslims, there was a lot of controversy.

So there is no official record. All these people came basically the night before or that morning, and many of them left by that evening. There was hardly a single disrupted event during the entire 24-hour period.

I remember before I went across watching the news on television, I've never seen so much Christian testimony come on the news in my history. And it went right across the world. Internet, everything went on C-SPAN.

That's a major cable network. The entire six hours was on C-SPAN. You could see it better there than if you were in the mall where they had seven or eight. I may not have that number exact of the largest, most high-tech screens that you can get a hold of.

I think there's less than 20 of these available in the world. The budget for this event was $10 million, excluding any travel or personal expense people had to get there. I noticed on the TV they were just recording a plane crash, and they were trying to find out whether it was promise keepers.

Two hours later, it was revealed they were people coming. A small plane crashed and exploded. No one died. In God's providence, it crashed near a fire and rescue base where they were practicing. And just, you know, even for someone as skeptical as me, this kind of thing, you know, always gets me believing that God somehow is involved again.

I went there specifically on the invitation of Promise Keepers International. I'd been meeting with them and invited them to Jokoway, our event in South Africa. That tape telling about Jokoway is available if you haven't heard that.

It was a privilege. On the Friday evening, we had a mini prayer concert, and I had the opportunity with my little globe to just share and to basically pray. And there was a bonding. Someone said to me later, a leader, because they were from all over the world, that if that was the only thing they had gone to, it would have been worth it.

Prayer, Repentance, and the Washington Gathering

Of course, that was just the beginning. This six-hour event was mainly prayer, the Word, repentance, some praise and worship, but not, you know, not overdone. And it was really, really quite overwhelming.

I decided not to just go and just sit there for six hours, which is a little bit too much like sitting in an airplane. But after a lot of wrestling and resisting, I decided to carry my balloon, big global balloon, around the periphery of the mall, which is a huge thing.

From the Capitol Building, over a mile, I think it is, to Lincoln Memorial and the White House. And everybody was in that area. If you know Washington, the big Washington Memorial, the big pencil-like thing, and all these big screens.

So I marched around the whole outside. It took me several hours. You could also listen on FM, although I heard much of it live. And when they stopped to pray, I usually stopped to pray. And I can only say, God met us in that place.

Again, I'm one of the first persons to say, just big events on their own are not enough. But many of us, even in this room or who are hearing this tape, we got started because of a big event. These meetings are not that similar to a Billy Graham evangelistic campaign.

In fact, the man who preached the gospel gave an invitation and, I mean, thousands of people stood. I think some were already Christians who stood, though the message was geared to the non-Christian.

Another speaker later on had 42 speakers, some of them very brief, of course. But no wonder I never get invited. This one brother whose name I heard later on gave a powerful, very balanced, powerful message, included a reference to Acts 1 -8, and included a slight mention of world missions.

Up to now, Promise Keepers has not been known for being proactive about world missions. Now that they are taking their own movement globally, of course they are having to look at world missions. And this is one of the reasons I changed my own scheduling and felt I should just be there.

I wanted to, and I prayed specifically to meet some of the leaders. I've been waiting a long time praying for some of these people. Well, Bill McCartney, Coach McCartney, he's known to some. That next morning he was on Meet the Press.

I mean, he was the most in-demand person in Washington. And as we had our final meeting of our international group, which was only 100 people, it seemed that he wasn't even there. And then suddenly I found out there was a dinner that evening.

I had forgotten that. Next thing I knew, I walked out, and there Coach McCartney was. Now, Christian Renling, one of my former helpers in OM Associates, has his own organization, is sort of starting to become like my agent.

That's not really true, but he likes to push me into situations. And you may think that I'm an extrovert and I just run into difficult situations, but I tell you, if it wasn't for Christian Renling, I don't think I would have ever met Coach McCartney or two of the other founding members.

And the birth of this vision took place in a car out there in Colorado around 1990. So it's a very young movement. And probably in the months to come, you will read criticism, you will hear criticism, especially from certain kinds of women.

But, in fact, God has raised up this amazing movement. And many of the most proactive people about it are women, because they know so many men in America have become wimps. And I don't think the average person even knows the situation of the average American male.

It is not like 20 years ago. It has completely changed. There are exceptions. Maybe in your little church, you've got lots of dynamic men, and they're the elders of the church. The church has quite a few exceptions.

But we're talking very generally about the masses of people in a land of 260 million. And most of these internationals at this consultation expressed that they felt the situation with men in their country was very, very similar.

So, in some ways, this seems to me like one of God's rescue programs. Is it a last-minute rescue program before Christ's return and the second coming of Christ was wonderfully proclaimed by one of the speakers?

Not in an extreme way, but a beautiful way. And the fact that this now has not only taken place and they saw the crowd that they expected, actually more perhaps than they expected. They had one million new testaments donated to give everyone.

They couldn't get those distributed. Their distribution wasn't fast enough, proactive enough to get them all out. A lot of them were left over at the end. People carried boxes of new testaments away. I might just insert here that for me, the three most exciting things, and I'll come back to what happened in that meeting with Bill McCartney, but three of the most exciting things before that happened was the opportunity to talk to two Afghans a little bit about Jesus.

Evangelism and Personal Encounters

There are many Afghans in Washington, D .C. I've started my research to see who's working among them. I've heard of one international missionary. I talked to Arlie Lowen, our Afghan man in Toronto. I had to grab a taxi.

On a particular occasion, the driver was an Afghan. I was getting rather hungry. I went to buy one of these inexpensive hot dogs, and the man selling the hot dogs was an Afghan. And of course, with all that was happening, it was easy to tell something of what was going on.

I've had this prayer for this year that somehow with all the increased responsibility I have and very much involvement with churches and Christians that the Lord would give me the privilege of being regularly in contact with non-Christians.

And God did that right there on that day, even though I was surrounded by almost a million men, many of whom were believers. The next non-Christian I was to meet was making an anti-documentary. He saw me with my balloon.

A lot of people saw me with my balloon, by the way. I can't understand it. I was the only guy carrying a balloon. You laugh, but there were endless, endless people carrying crosses. All kinds of guys were carrying crosses, small wheels, you know, all kinds, little crosses, big crosses.

You know, I wasn't the only eccentric there. There were many. But nobody was carrying a balloon. So that made quite an impact, especially in front of the Capitol building. And no one else had a global jacket.

One million men, no one else with a global jacket. I don't know what is happening with our global jacket sales force. Obviously, I didn't see everybody, so no doubt there may have been someone there. I think it's important to just throw in at this point that we need to be reminded again that the average person going to church, man or woman, is not thinking globally.

The average promise keeper is not thinking globally. The global challenge only came out during those six hours in a very, very small way. But I believe, as Coach McCartney shared, that especially in the year 2000, they have phenomenal plans, mainly for the states for the next two years.

Slow growth internationally, but the year 2000, they want to go global in a major way. Well, to jump back to where I was, Christian Rindling introduced me to these two other men who were founders of this movement, were with the founding of it, had very powerful fellowship with them.

And we ended up praying in this kind of accountability group prayer where I shared a struggle. One of them was leading promise keepers, and it was quite a big thing, especially for his wife, and we prayed for him.

And then I shared an area of struggle that I have when I get home from a trip and the lack of sensitivity with my wife. And they responded to that and prayed for me. And it was a... I got further in 20 minutes with those two men that sometimes I get with some people in a very long time.

They have an ethos that OM once had and still does have to some degree. They really believe that men need to get together and share. God convicted me that one of the many mistakes I've made in OM, one of the biggest, is when I allowed our men's meetings to end.

We used to have the most powerful men's meetings in the 60s, mainly dealing with sex but not exclusively. And we discovered after those meetings men would share, small groups, immorality, it would come out.

We also had similar meetings which were much more difficult with our sisters. And there would always be some, sisters especially, who would criticize the openness. It would frighten them. And then with various changes we tried to amalgamate.

We thought, well, things are changing now. We don't... You know, the whole unisex concept. You have a barber shop now and you have men and women getting their hair cut in the same place. This is not a new thing, by the way.

It came in the 70s. So we amalgamated those rather heavy kind of sessions and it ran into greater criticism and to some degree it died. It still takes place in O .M. in different venues and different places.

And I'm not criticizing O .M. And I want to study more of what these men are saying. But I came away from there realizing there's tremendous value for men to be able to get together on their own. And preferably, this is going to shock a few, outside of the walls of the church.

These great meetings where so many men have been converted and have come back to Christ, have been in gymnasiums, they've been in arenas. As one person shared with me, if they tried to do in a church, of course they don't know some of the churches that we know, but if they tried to do in the church what they do in these arenas, getting a little excited, praising God, lifting their hands a bit, you know, they would get the elbow from their wife.

Again, I'm sure that's present company excluded. But whatever you may think of Promise Keepers, and I will just say it is a movement loaded with weakness. But my dear brothers and sisters, OM is a movement.

And you may even have a few yourself. And I would just say that God is doing something through this movement. And I hope when it comes to your country, or when you read about it, and in your prayers, you can be proactive.

Their books are in Spanish. We'll be distributing those. The new book is in Swedish. We're going to be quite proactive about that. There are quite a few former OMers getting involved in this movement.

And it is very, very exciting. The media coverage of this event has been some of the greatest media coverage of any Christian event in this decade. Some of it is negative. And Billy Graham has run into the same problem.

I don't know if you've heard news from San Francisco. But Billy Graham in San Francisco, they ganged up on him, the media. And he is a hard man to get him to fumble. But they got him on the homosexual issue, and he would not move.

Homosexual practice is a sin. And I tell you, they came unglued against him. They are now digging stuff that he has said from the 50s. That is going into major prints, going into the Internet. And there's a fresh new vindictive attack against Billy Graham, of course, just going to San Francisco as an evangelical, where the message Billy Graham has is almost taking your life in your hands.

By the way, this other unconverted person I met was producing an anti-documentary. They think this movement is sort of right-wing with a political agenda. Many of these people may be somewhat right.

But many of them were not necessarily right-wing. And I'm convinced they don't have a political agenda. Bill McCartney answered that question brilliantly. That doesn't mean there isn't some overlap. Because if you say you don't believe in abortion, just saying that, you have a political agenda.

You're right-wing. So, I mean, how do you put that together? Even that issue and the homosexual issue, which is so hot in America, it seems to me they're handling very carefully. Now, sometimes the media just grabs any old person, and some of those people are not able to handle the media.

And then really stupid things get said, and that gets multiplied. And that is a good reason that many more of us on OM should go to our effective communicators conference and learn how to talk to people.

Accountability, Purity, and Spiritual Leadership

I ended up sitting next to Bill McCartney for supper that night. I know that may seem like a small thing. I believe my desire to get next to him isn't what some people may think. I desire to be an encouragement to this man.

I desire to know them, to serve. And I have this prayer that they will become proactive about world missions and the unreached people. All the countries they're going into are all the traditional Anglo-Saxon countries.

In fact, all English-speaking, except Germany, they've entered into. They're not thinking. And we don't believe they have to think about Turkey, Afghanistan, many of these other places. But can you imagine?

And they've got over 25 stadium meetings planned for the United States. They no longer are going to charge. They're going to open it wider. They want more unconverted people to come, and it will be free of charge.

Major foundations, including some friends of ours, are getting involved financially. They did take an offering at the end of this big event, and at the same time give everybody a free meal as they walked away.

Just quite, quite awesome. I'd like to just pray with you because we are watching the clock, and just especially pray for a relatively young movement that has grown as fast as any movement in the history of the church, with phenomenal vulnerability.

And to pray for Bill McCartney. I just maybe had about a half an hour talking with him as we ate, and then he spoke. He gave a very balanced, excellent message. Others spoke at that dinner, and then we've all scattered.

What is the next step? I'm not sure. But I don't think all that's going on in the work of God is ever to be decompartmentalized. What's going on with Campus Crusade and the Jesus film? By the way, they have just received one of the biggest gifts ever for the Jesus film.

Partly because of the phenomenal atomic explosion of Ted Turner's one million to the United Nations. Billion, thank you. One billion, one thousand million we say here in England to the United Nations.

This has stirred up people that non-Christians seem to be now giving more lavishly than Christians. And this has led a foundation to do something they don't normally do, to chop into the assets. They always think of giving away interest.

That's the normal way of approaching things. But they decided to give away this foundation and have given a huge gift to the Jesus film. But whether it's AD2000, or the Jesus film, or Chicoe, or Lausanne, or WEF, some of the men I met at the international meeting, I met him at Chicoe, I met him at WEF, and I met him in Korea.

We are basically one, even though there's great diversity and we know, of course, in many cases, serious disunity. We don't want to pretend otherwise. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for what you did in Washington this past Saturday.

And what you've done these past seven or eight years through Promise Keepers. These men, so often backed by their wives and women, who have become proactive in prayer, in ministry, in moral purity, in walking in the light, in being better fathers, in being committed to spiritual leadership in the home and in the church.

We thank you for Bill McCartney's challenge that everything now must go back to the local church, that every Promise Keeper must submit to his pastor. Many could hardly believe their ears as this challenge came out over this huge gathering there in the Washington Mall.

And Lord, we believe, though the battle is going to be fierce, though there are many dark clouds hanging over us as well, we believe that this is part of building your kingdom across the world. We thank you for so many women's movements over the years and even other smaller men's movements like the Christian businessmen.

Lord, something has really taken off here and we give you the praise and we give you the glory in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, sitting on the train coming here, I just wrote a couple of words down that I want to just put a few exhortations around and then you can fly away.

Praise God for the freedom we have in Jesus Christ. May we not abuse that. Praise God for the Grace Awakening. It includes the challenge about discipline. We now have our own OM edition of that book, Grace Awakening, 10 ,000 copies.

Instead of $20, $1 .37. Just let me know how many you want. That's really more for outside the UK because here in the UK we've always had the paperback, which they never had in the United States until recently.

But there's just a few words that I wanted to base a few thoughts on and I would really ask you to pray. Allow the Holy Spirit to speak. You know, many of these men were not Christians or they were baby Christians.

And we may say, well, they respond in such a naive way. They don't really know what they're getting into. No one's given them, you know, Luke 14 orientation, count the cost, scared them right out of their shoes so they wouldn't dare lay down on the grass and pray.

By the way, when I did that interview with that non-converted person, he got so caught up with what I was saying, he let the video camera run until almost it was out of video. And in God's providence, Elwood Ellis, one of the leading black, most articulate black persons in America, great friend of mine, in the midst of this draft, spots me with a balloon and comes up.

I say, Elwood, this guy wants to interview you. And I told that guy, here's a far better man to talk to than me. And being black, he wasn't about to refuse him, this little white guy from California. He interviewed Elwood Ellis for 15 minutes.

Later on in God's providence, I met him at the very end when everybody was dispersed. He was sitting on a bench with his video camera and he said, they were the two best interviews I've got today. My burden is not his documentary, though I pray it may not come out so negative, but that that young man may come to know the Lord Jesus.

He was offended and hurt because some people sort of ganged up on him when they found out that he wasn't a Christian. And it was a beautiful experience for me. And I hope that with all of our evangelistic methods that we continue to learn in OM, that we will learn how to talk to people who are initially offended by our jargon, by our presentation, by our terminology, that we can just be real with those people.

We can use more secular terminology to try to share with them the message of the love of Christ. One of the greatest persons in the world doing that is a man named Doug Coe. Doug Coe is the man behind The Prayer Breakfast.

He's the man behind many men and women in ministry, especially at government and business level throughout the world. And in God's providence, it worked out to get about a half an hour with Doug, which was like a renewal.

Doug Coe spoke at one of the first OM conferences in history, Madrid, Spain, 1961 or 62. And he spoke about keeping the focus on the Lord Jesus. And it looks like there may be ways that our ship and other parts of OM in the future may be able to network in to their phenomenal small group network around the world.

Very different than promise keepers. A very highly contextualized approach to non-Christians, to government people. Quite controversial also, as many contextual kinds of approaches are. Very, very relational.

I find, this is just a quick tangent, but I find that when certain people find out how relational OM is, for them just to hear that several hundred have been in this work linked together for over a quarter of a century blows their mind.

It blows their mind. And with some people that means more than all of our great goals and aims and all the things we put on paper that we long for them to give their money to. Because they're relational people.

And you have, of course, all kinds of people and it's a challenge to meet so many of them. God has given Doug Coe and his fellowship a beautiful building. Beautiful home, right behind the Capitol building.

Some congressman actually lived there. To my amazement, two friends from Cape Town, South Africa, run that ministry. And that business person who I'd met in his office a few years ago and great friends of O .M. and the ship ministry.

They are running that ministry on a famous C Street behind the big dome in Washington. Well, by now, your curiosity is at saturation level. What are these verver words? Some of you are probably tired of getting verver words and you think the first one is going to be grace.

Intimidation, Fear, and Failure

But actually, the first word is intimidation. I want to just talk to you a little bit about intimidation. It's impossible in any one message not to get in trouble. So I hope you'll be merciful. But I do feel that we as Christians are often more easily intimidated than non-Christians.

Though in the United States one of the reasons the average male is in the state he's in and we're being very general, is because men have been intimidated. They've been intimidated by their failures. They've been intimidated by the women's rights, equal rights movement.

Some of that movement I'm sure is good. Some may not be so good. Many of them are intimidated, especially Christians, by sexual failure. And they don't know how to get out of that. And it's quite amazing when we see so many non-Christians just sort of barreling through and being incredibly successful.

Right now, America is on a roll financially. The stock market is up. Ted Turner, when he gave away that one billion, all that was was a stock increase from last year. The foundation I'm linked with, that we are linked with, that a couple of years ago looked like they were in trouble, their stock has gone off the charts.

There's a lot of money to give away right now in the United States and some other countries. Of course, if you're following the Pacific Rim, you know that Malaysia and Singapore, that part of the world has been hit.

Devaluation, tremendous drop in the stock market. That may have changed even since the last time I looked at it. But it is interesting to make comparisons between Christians and non-Christians. I am forced to do that because I live in a non-Christian world.

And I know that we have an abundant life in Jesus Christ that they don't know anything about. So you don't have to worry about me over-exalting the non-Christian. He's lost, he's on the road to hell, and he needs Jesus.

I met with another amazing character, Clark Kennedy, who now has a new job working as my helper with the 82 ,000 movement and other networks internationally that we're now involved with. He was with me in Washington, so was Rick Hicks.

That was exciting that he wasn't feeling so well. But we met with another man just yesterday morning, and this man's one focus is to win golfers for Christ. He has asked me, I feel sure he's going to back down, he has asked me to speak in Australia at a huge golf event.

And I may have to play golf first. One thing you never want to watch is my golf. But maybe I could take some lessons. He was just sharing how this outstanding Christian, some of you golfers can help me, Bernard Lange, who went way down to almost 100, and very much an outspoken Christian.

Of course, when they go down in their profession, people talk. And many were making this a matter of prayer. And Bernard Lange, in the last few weeks, has had some major wins. And of course, on a practical level, it's his new putter.

He has this weird putter, I think it comes up to his nose, I don't know, maybe he operates like some kind of a compass. But he's certainly putting very well. I believe one of the reasons some non-Christians go further than Christians in their basic work is because they are tougher.